Texas content with low Latino voter turnout

Democracy in Texas is broken. And one unsettling conclusion is that those in power like it that way just fine.

We do indeed have elections. But these are to representative government what those building fronts on theater stages and movie sets are to real buildings. There's not much behind them.

Two recent reports demonstrate this.

The first, released earlier this month by the U.S. Census Bureau, examines the nation's voting habits. Broken down by state for congressional and presidential elections from 1996 to 2010, Texas fares among the worst in percentage of citizens voting. Only West Virginia is consistently worse.

Texas falls in the bottom five, with the 2000 election being an exception, when it finished in the bottom eight (voting its governor president).

Texas ranges from a low of 36.4 percent of citizens 18 and older voting in 2010 to a high of 57.1 percent in 2004.

And don't get me started on local elections. Folks, we are electing local officials with single-digit turnout percentages.

As elsewhere, more Texans go to the polls in presidential elections than in nonpresidential years. And, yes, some of those states with higher voting rates don't exactly have bragging rights. It's bad all over, with U.S. rates lagging those in other established democracies. But this is cold comfort if your state is consistently among the worst of the bad.

That's one report. Another came recently from the left-leaning Center for American Progress. It heralds the “untapped electoral power” of Latinos.

The center looked at the number of unregistered but eligible Latinos plus legal immigrants eligible for citizenship in 10 states. It compared this to the margin of victory for the presidential candidate who won that state in 2008. And it concludes, correctly, that Latinos wield enormous electoral potential.

The Center for American Progress obviously is staffed by glass-half-full people. Potential for the moment equals nonparticipation.

The Census analysis notes characteristics that correlate to higher voter participation — education, age and, you guessed it, race and ethnicity. It doesn't mention income but others do.

So, in Texas there are, according to the center, 2.15 million unregistered but voter-eligible Latinos. There are another 880,000 legal permanent residents who could become naturalized citizens. The GOP won the state by a margin of 950,695 in 2008, which would have been overwhelmed if just those unregistered Latinos voted for Obama at the same rate as Latinos did nationally, 67 percent.

The Census, in noting the correlation between education and age (older citizens vote more often), also points to the obstacles in turning potential into real votes. The Latino population disproportionately has less than college and high school educations, and so has lower incomes. And, as a group, they are on the young side.

It's as if they've got us coming and going — as if those in power, noting the Latino surge, actively are taking steps to thwart even those eligible to vote. And, in shorting public education, it's as if they're taking steps to keep others uneducated and nonvoting.